Manage your Corporate Social Media Strategy With iPhone
by Bill French on 29/01/10 at 5:00 am
Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.
I’m certainly biased (proud iPhone user), but I have a hunch that there’s no better platform to leverage social media for business and marketing purposes than iPhone. My conclusion is based on years of experience, testing, and modeling processes around certain iPhone apps and their desktop counterparts. My conclusion that iPhone is the best platform for mobile social media management is reinforced because I regularly speak with colleagues (who are social media experts) to compare notes, successes, and failures.
iPhone provides the most powerful professional social media platform for achieving results with the best possible productivity and the greatest operational efficiency. Indeed, this article sets the compass heading for Mobile Social Media Management.
Why Should CTOs, CIOs, and CMOs Care?
Technical and management leads at corporations such as CTOs, CIOs, and CMOs might say “So what. How does this social media craze affect me? Why is this important at a business level?” Other business issues typically emerge when the topic of social media marketing pops up including risk management, security, and ROI. These are excellent questions and non-trivial issues that require some thought and careful consideration.
Engaging customers, prospects, journalists, and partners in online social venues is no different than engaging these same entities with your telephone, email, print advertising, and support services. Five years ago, few of us had Facebook accounts and even fewer had Twitter accounts. A small percentage of us were using Linkedin. This is no longer the case; it’s hard to find someone without a Facebook page and the vast majority of business professionals are using Linkedin.
All C-level executives now care (or should care) about social media and social networking because the alternative is no different than ignoring the phone when it rings or deleting your inbox without reading the messages. For the most part, sales executives and other customer-facing workers already understand how necessary social media is to be truly effective in their roles. To ignore online social interaction opportunities has definitive consequences. The good news is that iPhone coupled with certain apps can provide a unified mobile social media methodology that will pay big dividends without significant time requirements.
Business Drivers
It’s a good idea to build your mobile social media strategy with business requirements in mind. While the details and context of your own business will largely dictate the requirements, this checklist will provide a good start.
Mobile social media professionals must be able to …
- Monitor important and relevant social networking activity.
- Compose and publish new social media items including images and ideally video.
- Compose and publish new social media responses, comments, and reactions.
- Collaborate with other workers engaging in social media activities.
- Coordinate social media activities in concert with overall team and company objectives.
- Automate and streamline certain social activities.
- Measure social media performance.
Social Media Process
Operationally efficient social media activities are nearly non-existent. Almost every social networking and publishing task requires some degree of [manual] effort, a little experience, and some skill. But before assuming that all social media is human-capital intensive, consider the business requirements for your role and break them down by process segment. There are four basic segments of social media success:
- Searching
- Listening
- Responding
- Publishing
These activity segments are listed in order of importance in spite of the fact that most experts will tell you to start immediately by publishing some form of social media content. Personally, I think this is backwards. Pundits and colleagues are quick to tell you to start a blog; few will tell you to spend time searching or listening.
Searching social media is not the same as searching Google for websites. You need new tools and an approach that is easily repeated and [ideally] maintained for you. Because social media and networks are constantly being updated, the concept of persistent search is a key success factor. You want to spend as little time as possible typing queries, so when you do types queries, they should stick.
Listening helps you understand your prospects, customers, and most important – what your competitors are up to in social environments. Listening leads to awareness of opportunities which will (in turn) compel you to respond to certain people and companies.
Responding to social media items typically falls into two categories – (i) seizing specific opportunities, and (ii) being heard. While listening to the social strata in your industry and business community, you’ll invariably encounter opportunities to join the conversation – some will be specific instances where the door to business development has been kicked open – you need only walk through the door to obtain a new prospect. Other conversations will simply present an opportunity to create more awareness about who you are and what you do.
“Good listening habits lead to new business discussions
and direct opportunities to promote
yourself and your business. “
Publishing emerges as an extension of responding, however, many of the topics you encounter while engaging at a conversational level, will encourage you to write more in-depth articles, typically the domain of blogs.
Social Media Environments
Often times, the best iPhone apps fail to meet business requirements because they lack a desktop equivalent; this can also be said about stellar web apps that lack a native iPhone app. I advise my clients to think about the business requirements when trying to assess whether your social media apps should also have desktop counterparts.
A key idea that I always give serious thought to is the ability to configure the environment for the best operational performance and be able to use the environment seamlessly across all devices without managing separate configurations – iPhone and desktop alike. TweetDeck was the first Twitter app to embrace this idea. You can create a view configuration on the desktop version of TweetDeck and by sharing it to “the cloud”, your iPhone TweetDeck app will make the same view available while mobile. This is a key requirement if you are using your tools to monitor, search, respond, and publish – especially important if you are managing more than one Twitter account for example.
Choosing The Best Environment for Your Business
To some degree, the best environment for managing social media for your business is subjective. However, we can paint a fair performance thumbnail based on the business requirements noted above. It’s important that you factor in your own requirements including staff skills and application fitness for your social media objectives. It’s also important to realize that choosing any one of these tools doesn’t necessarily rule out the use of others. I use Gist predominantly for listening, HootSuite for augmenting my listening activities with numerous persistent search queries and some publishing and responding.
The rating methodology used here assumes that social media activities are 1.5 times as important as the platforms supported.
Feel free to share your experiences concerning your favorite social media tools.
My conclusion that iPhone is the best platform for mobile social media management is reinforced because I regularly speak with colleagues (who are social media experts) to compare notes, successes, and failures.
alissaqw
May 24th, 2010
Agreed. Had a hunch iPhone knew this was going to happen
data recovery
May 24th, 2010
Agreed. Had a hunch iPhone knew this was going to happen